George Handley

Author, Humanist, Environmental Advocate

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Home Waters: A Blog

This is the Place

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Jacob lay down on stones for pillows and slept. And in his dreams he saw a ladder reaching up into heaven with “the angels of God ascending and descending on it.” It was a curious thing, to be sure, to find oneself sleeping on stones only to then discover that, as he says in the morning when he has returned to his natural senses, “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I knew it not.” Upon further reflection, this causes him to feel overwhelmed by what had once seemed so ordinary. “How dreadful is this place!” he says, “This is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven!” And so he anoints the stone and calls it Bethel—House of the Lord. In the Hebrew, Ma nora HaMakom hazeh!, this can also mean “How awesome is this place!” Wonder and awe, maybe even a tinge of dread, all among the stones of the earth. And so he anoints his stony pillow with oil. This is the place.
My favorite stones are the river rocks that cradle the high mountain streams of the Wasatch and Uinta Mountain ranges. They are round like pillows, some tan, some pink, and some red or brown. They have been polished by who knows how many millions of hours of water impatient to reach some distant conclusion. Once while watching the sun shine down upon these stones as I stood in the middle of the Provo River, only moments after they had been sprinkled by a brief and gentle rain, they looked like small loaves of bread. I felt the river bank had been transformed into some kind of repository of seer stones, each one daring me to believe that they were just mute rock. There was no doubt that I felt startled by a presence, a kind of grace or holiness, but I want to be clear: this was no out of body experience. I was shivering, standing in the middle of a cold stream on a brittle October day, fully aware of my body and the body of the earth, but suddenly it was as if all of my physical experience were none other than the sum total of what heaven might be. How awesome is this place, I might have said. The native inhabitants of my valley had indeed called the canyon where I live, House of the Gods, so the impulse to make this earth a temple goes far back into time. It is an ancient but forgotten impulse. I don’t mean the impulse to build temples. That certainly is alive and well among the Mormons and certainly not a dead art in many other parts of the world. I mean the impulse to see ourselves already in one. To seize upon the ordinary qualities of physical places and see them as sites of traffic between this world and the next. Why else are Jacob’s angels ascending and descending? People are dying and leaving but it seems they are also returning.
A man well acquainted with grief was Joseph F. Smith; he was the nephew of the Mormon prophet whom assassins killed along with the boy’s father Hyrum. He then lost his mother at age 13. Several of his children died young, and he presided over the LDS church during World War I and the influenza outbreak. He also gave temples the most profound purpose of connecting the living and the dead. He had this to say about the familiar dead:
“I believe we move and have our being in the presence of heavenly messengers and of heavenly beings. We are not separate from them. … We are closely related to our kindred, to our ancestors … who have preceded us into the spirit world. We can not forget them; we do not cease to love them; we always hold them in our hearts, in memory, and thus we are associated and united to them by ties that we can not break…. We live in their presence, they see us, they are solicitous for our welfare, they love us now more than ever. For now they see the dangers that beset us; … their love for us and their desire for our well being must be greater than that which we feel for ourselves.”
If a place is made holy to us because of the experiences we have lived in it and the memories and ancestral connections it contains, is it enough to say that holiness is a human and physical notion, that we love a place because of the dead we have lost? I think holiness is a dual, Janus-faced concept. We make things holy in our very human and physical condition but we also do so because we catch glimpses of something beyond the physical, because the longer we encounter and wonder at the particularities of place, the less they feel like the delineations of what limits us and the more they feel like portals, sites of ascension and condescension, between what we are and what we will become. A place ends up being about so much more than what our human story has become but instead a way of connecting us to the whole of human experience and maybe even the whole of time before we ever emerged on this rock.
The great lesson of Jacob, then, is to walk gently where we are. Because if one stone is worthy of anointing, the world itself is our bed of dreams, the context that shapes the value of all our affections. And to its life-cradling powers we owe our best and most tender care. Some people have overdeveloped fears that if we start caring about the environment, we will have misplaced our affections for God onto the earth, but Joseph F. Smith once articulated a concept as old as, well, Genesis, or at least as St. Francis of Assisi, that our duty, as he put it, is “to love God in His creations.” 

Soccer Dad

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I am told that few states in the country have a higher level of participation of girls in soccer than Utah. I don’t doubt it. Every Saturday everywhere in this valley are wide swaths of soccer fields dotted with colored jerseys of girls, and boys, playing their hearts out in front of their parents and siblings. People by the thousands do this all along the Wasatch Front, screaming, laughing, yelling, chatting, enjoying the pleasures of warm sunshine, community, and family pride. Or at least as long as the weather holds. Soccer in the spring is generally unpredictable in Utah, sometimes happening in a minor blizzard, a wind storm, thunder and lightning, horizontal rain, brittle cold and clear days, or almost summer weather, causing parents and players alike to melt. [Read more…] about Soccer Dad

Connecting the Dots on Climate Change

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A remarkable alliance of concern about climate change has emerged among the nation’s clergy. Major ecclesiastical leaders in the world, including Pope Benedict, the Patriarch Bartholomew, the Dalai Lama, and many others, have expressed public concern about the moral responsibility of civilization to act on behalf of the planet’s weakening capacity to regulate our climate. One national organization, Interfaith Power & Light, has been leading the way to formulate a religious response to climate change. As the Chair of the Board of the Utah chapter (see http://www.utahipl.org/), I recently spent three days in Washington, D.C. where the national conference for IPL took place, involving two representatives, most of them clergy from various churches and religions, from 39 states as well as the national leadership, including IPL’s founder, Rev. Sally Bingham. You can read more about IPL here: http://interfaithpowerandlight.org/. The conference included speeches by the Deputy Director of the EPA, Bob Perciasepe, and the award-winning journalist, Eric Pooley, author of Climate War.

Those who see climate change as a partisan issue will feel that this is an unfortunate politicization of religion, but to those who see this as a moral, rather than a political issue, will understand this as an appropriate, even needed, response to the crisis. Of course, there are those too who simply deny that climate change is happening, so to them such efforts by IPL and others might seem even worse: a waste of otherwise good energy spent on a cause that doesn’t exist. Perhaps there are others still who know it is happening, sense it is a serious issue, but they tend to look at someone who cares about it enough to be an activist as, well, an activist, which around here is a synonym for an annoying, single-issue prig. I am well aware how often people see the moralizing of others as politics as usual. It is no simple matter to separate the political from the moral dimensions of any issue. But I was encouraged by the motivations of the clergy present at the conference to move their congregations toward a way of life that leaves a more gentle impact on the environment, that demonstrates more self-restraint, ingenuity and innovation, and concern for the well-being of others and of the Creation. This seemed like merely asking people to put their religion to work. I felt it an honor to be among such fine and good people. Meeting them and others in my home state of Utah of other faith traditions has been one of the most rewarding and spiritually fulfilling experiences of my life.

I live in a state where a higher percentage of the population denies climate change is real or human-caused than occurs nationally (national denial hovers at around 10%–see http://environment.yale.edu/climate/files/SixAmericasMay2011.pdffor more information) and where the LDS church has never issued a statement of concern about climate change. It is, perhaps, the default attitude here, then, that it is either not happening, or if it is, it is not our fault. Moreover, if it is human-caused, the assumption is perhaps that until the church says otherwise, we might as well assume it is God’s will. Clergy from around the country run into this kind of resistance and skepticism all the time, so this is certainly not unique to Mormonism. However, given exceptional LDS doctrines about the spiritual creation, about plants and animals as “living souls,” about the law of consecration and our concern for the world’s poor and for equitable distribution of natural resources, and given our principles of self-reliance, modest consumption of material wealth, and resourcefulness, it is at least disappointing that we LDS have not done more to declare our collective commitment to reducing our carbon footprint.

Clergy at the conference were especially eager to ask me about Utah and Mormons. What principles and values in Mormonism are especially well suited to formulate a religious response to climate change and environmental degradation more generally? What are the prevailing attitudes among church members or at official levels of church leadership? Does the church ever discourage members from worrying about climate change? What is motivating the church’s move toward green architecture? How can non-LDS clergy reach out to Mormons in their home states and encourage them to be involved? Could Mitt Romney be a good environmental president? Would this have anything to do with his Mormonism? Who and where are the leaders in Mormonism on the environment? What are the Mormons already doing to be good stewards?

These are not easy questions to answer, but they are, I think, the right questions to ask. I have tried answering some of these in my writings, particularly in my essays “The Environmental Ethics of Mormon Belief” and “Faith and the Ethics of Climate Change,” in an co-edited book, Stewardship and the Creation (http://rsc.byu.edu/%5Bfield_status-raw%5D/stewardship-and-creation-lds-perspectives-environment), and in my book, Home Waters.

While spending a day at the end of the conference lobbying on Capitol Hill, Susan Soleil (the Executive Director of Utah IPL) and I visited the offices of Senator Mike Lee, Senator Orrin Hatch, and Representative Jim Matheson. The highlight was a discussion with Orrin Hatch’s top environmental aide who gave us more than an hour of his time. Among the topics we discussed was his view of the divisiveness of the word “climate” and the words “global warming.” He advised us not to talk about these things, that we could get a lot more done just by focusing on fundamentals like energy efficiency, economic self-reliance, and good stewardship. I tried to explain to him that it seems hard to properly treat an illness when you aren’t allowed to mention the illness by name and can’t therefore offer a comprehensive diagnosis. Moreover, it seemed petty to imagine that somehow divisiveness over the issue is the fault of those who wish to use the proper name for what is happening and not of those who cannot accept even the remote possibility that climate change is real and human-caused. I am all for finding common ground. This might sound overly cynical, but the truth is, it is rare to meet a skeptic who is at least willing to meet me half way, who is willing to say, “This is a serious issue. I have my doubts and questions about it, but I can see why it is of moral concern, and I am committed to working to find viable solutions that are at least consistent with my values, in case it is real. It is simply too serious of a possibility to take lightly.” I agreed with Hatch’s aide in principle. We can get a lot done to reduce carbon if we work together on policies and practices calculated to lessen our dependency on fossil fuels, to increase access to clean and renewable energy, and to increase energy efficiency. We could, as I have often said, if we cared more about doing good than being right. Two such bills stand before the Senate and the House at this very moment. Unfortunately, as we all know, the chances of this Congress getting any legislation done right now are slim to none.

Today is connect-the-dots day, sponsored by 350.org, to help remind people of the impacts of climate change in neighborhoods and homes across the globe. I am having a hard time connecting the dots. I see the problem, and I see the solution, but I see a morass of bureaucracy, indifference, ignorance, and ideology that stands in the way of common sense. I offer entry this as my own personal “dot” in the hope that it finds connection.

Acts of God

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Not too long ago Pat Robertson claimed that the increase in tornadoes in the country was due to the fact that people weren’t praying enough. He thought the Haitians deserved their suffering following the recent earthquake too because of a deal he feels they made with the devil when they wickedly decided to overthrow their own slaveowners in the early 1800s. Ken Hamm, the director of the Creation Museum in Kentucky, similarly argues that all suffering is caused by human moral depravity. We always get, in other words, what we deserve.
It wouldn’t even be worth refuting such reprehensible theology except for the fact that it is not altogether uncommon. I do not doubt that we give God no end of reasons to be disappointed in us. And yes I believe in the persistence of human sin. But surely among God’s great disappointments is how frequently we rush to facile interpretations of history and glib judgment of others, finding causal explanations for events that allow us to escape our responsibility to react in compassion to the suffering of others. For if God feels anything for us, we can only hope it begins with compassion.
What is perhaps particularly insidious about this kind of theology is how consistently it denies any human responsibility for influencing the scale, frequency, or impact of natural disasters, evidence of which abounds. We know that because of reckless and unchecked emissions of greenhouse gases (the U.S. being the chief per capita offender), we are increasing the likelihood of extreme weather patterns in the world. That is not to say, of course, that we cause the rain to fall, the wind to blow, or the earth to shake. But we cannot pretend that these events are merely chance or purelyprovidential. Both attitudes shield us from our accountability and our answerability.
We know that the poor are the most vulnerable to extreme weather. Places like Haiti or the US South have long histories of human injustice, environmental and human exploitation, and desperate efforts to survive, all of which has rendered people more vulnerable to large-scale suffering in the wake of hurricanes, earthquakes, or tornadoes. These are people who in their deep poverty have had their resources taken by others and have had to scramble for sources of energy amid impoverished soils and denuded forests, polluted air, land vulnerable to mudslides, and homes and neighborhoods more exposed to the elements. These are histories that have their roots in human choices, in human violence, and in human indifference.
Fortunately many rush to the aid of those affected by such “acts of God,” as the insurance companies like to call them, but we ought to ask ourselves some tough questions about prevention. One Episcopal minister wonders how long we can continue to pluck people out of what he calls the “river of woe” before we head upstream and try to find out what or who is throwing them in in the first place. We often hear the mantra that to give a man a fish is to feed him for a day but to teach him to fish is to feed him for a lifetime. I suppose it might be useful to apply this principle to humanitarian aid. To help men and women in a moment of crisis is to help them for a day but to work for a more just and sustainable world where people and ecosystems alike are healthier, more self-sustaining, and less vulnerable to the negative effects of human choices is to help future generations.
I don’t pretend to have all the answers about how to help. At least we know that certainly education, particularly of women, seems to be key. But I do think it is naïve to assume that individuals can help themselves under any circumstances just as long as they are taught self-reliance. The world’s worst problems and many of humanity’s saddest tales of suffering prove over and over again how complexly interconnected we all are on this planet and how difficult it is for people to pull themselves up by the proverbial bootstraps when they are stuck in the morass of an environment we have degraded by our own acts. 

The Intersection of Poverty and the Environment

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Last Saturday I had the privilege of participating in a panel discussion about the intersection of poverty and the environment sponsored by the Episcopal Church. Before our panel discussion, the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, The Most Rev. Dr. Katherine Jefferts Schori, gave a stirring sermon on the need for us to give our attention to those who are the most vulnerable to the effects of global environmental degradation. This topic was motivated by one of the five “Marks of Mission” in the Episcopal Church: “To strive to safeguard the integrity of creation and sustain and renew the life of the earth.” I was asked to speak from my experience as a Mormon. I spent many weeks wondering: What could I add to the conversation? Because the conversation was brief, I have a surfeit of thoughts that I suppose find their outlet here. You can read about the panel discussion at http://www.episcopalchurch.org/page/intersection-environment-and-poverty-forum. You can view the video of the panel here: http://www.episcopalchurch.org/page/intersection-poverty-and-environment-forum

The people who are already suffering disproportionately the effects of climate change, industrial and nuclear waste, and pollution live in the poorest areas of the world, especially along the Pacific coasts of Asia and South America, in Sub-Saharan African, and along the Indian Ocean coasts. Environmentally related diseases are on the rise. Over a billion people do not have access to clean drinking water. Political instability grows as people struggle over ever more precarious and scarce natural resources, as was evident in Darfur. As climate patterns cause more weather extremes, these problems will only get worse. It is for this reason that climate change is recognized by our own Defense Department as one of the most serious threats to our national security.

To begin a conversation about this intersection in a Christian context makes perfect sense, if you take seriously the Christian mandate to worry ourselves first about the weak. Such a conversation is motivated by an understanding that we need to broaden our definition of community so that we include costs downwind and downstream to those less fortunate. No one likes to hear that well-intended and otherwise relatively benign behavior, such as driving a car, can negatively impact unseen people and places on the planet. The truth is that a culture of individualism like ours cannot provide an adequate ethics to address problems of such complexity and magnitude as climate change or even air pollution. I cannot adequately measure how, for example, driving my son to his soccer game might impact a small village in Guatemala, let alone my neighbors in Provo. But neither can I afford to pretend there is no relationship or that loving only my son is enough love for the world. As Christian ethicist Michael Northcott argues, love is most meaningful when we allow the “needs of the weak [to] set the standard for the requirements of love and not the capacities of the strong.”

When I think about what it means to love where I live, as I do in this blog, I must also ask what the definition of my community is. Is it my town? My state? My nation? What of the planet? My religious faith has something to say about this. Proper stewardship of the earth’s resources is defined scripturally as honoring God by sharing wealth equitably so as to “clothe the naked, and to feed the hungry, and to liberate the captive and administer relief to the sick and afflicted” (Book of Mormon). My faith teaches that “it is not given that one man should possess that which is above another, wherefore the world lieth in sin. Woe unto him that sheddeth blood or wasteth flesh and hath no need.” (Doctrine and Covenants). In short, my religion teaches that all of my freedoms, privileges, and means are given so that I might seek the wellbeing of all humankind, the very family of God, and that this broad definition of community is the context in which to assess the meaning of what I do and how I live.

As was evident in the interfaith panel discussion on Saturday, every religion has similar principles that teach moderation, reverence, and relief of human and natural suffering.  The current climate crisis presents a unique opportunity for believers of all faiths and non-believers alike to put aside religious and political differences and work together for solutions. We should start by committing to reduce our individual and collective impact on the earth’s fragile climate and its ecosystems because the climate crisis threatens the wellbeing of the world’s poor.

Every major national and international scientific organization in the world has affirmed the evidence that the miraculous processes that support life on this planet—the ocean’s capacity to regulate climate, the atmosphere’s capacity to trap heat, life’s capacity to flourish in diversity, and photosynthesis that trades carbon for oxygen—are being compromised by our use of fossil fuels. We are #1 in the world in per capita consumption of many of the world’s natural resources, including fossil fuels. So it makes reason stare to imagine that somehow we are doing right by the world to defend our wasteful consumption habits as our American “right.” It is heartbreaking as a citizen of this state to watch the willingness of elected officials to twist or cherry pick empirical evidence or ignore it altogether just to uphold a political ideology that pretends that we can sate ourselves on the bounties of the earth without harming the planet’s health or the lives of the poor.

Environmental ruin has a human face. We make God-given freedom a shallow and selfish value if we fail to live up to our God-given responsibility to our fellow man. Freedom is never diminished when we live with greater self-restraint and willingly take collective action on behalf of those less fortunate. That isn’t socialism. It is basic Christian morality.

On the Theologies and Ideologies of the Earth

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Giving an interview always leaves unfinished business. In my interview with KCPW on Wednesday, a caller (later identified as Scott Howell, Democratic candidate for US Senate in Utah) asked my opinion of HB 148, a piece of legislation recently passed by the Utah State Legislature and signed by Governor Gary Herbert. I said that while in theory taking back federal lands into state control could result in better stewardship of those lands, I didn’t have confidence that this piece of legislation was motivated by concerns for or commitments to sustainability. I know this because these are the same legislators and the same governor who also emphatically deny climate change is real and human-caused, who actively support the coal industry, who advocate for fracking, and are only willing to ask industrial polluters to place voluntary restraints on themselves to help improve Utah’s declining air quality. They are also the first to discourage the development of clean and renewable energy sources. It is because behind this policy lies a theological view of stewardship with which I fundamentally disagree.

In 2010, I participated with dozens of citizens in an initiative called Faith and the Land, where we gathered in small communities of faith—Quakers, Episcopalians, Jews, Mormons, and others—to discuss the value of wilderness in our spiritual lives. These were not political discussions about policy. We simply met to discuss what wilderness experiences mean to us on a personal level. What emerged was a remarkable consensus about our need for these lands as sources of spiritual renewal. (http://action.suwa.org/site/DocServer/faith_and_the_land_4-10_Layout_1.pdf?docID=4001)

A small group of us went to Congressman Rob Bishop’s office in Brigham City to plead for greater protection of wild lands in Utah. Representative Bishop has never been warm to the idea of wilderness preservation, but because he sits on the natural resources committee of Congress that determines the fate of federal land in Utah, it seemed necessary to open the dialogue. Oddly enough, at one point in the discussion he turned to me and began to debate me about the meaning of the mandate to Adam and Eve to “dress the garden.” He said that it was clear that our purpose on this earth is always to improve on nature, which for him seems always to mean to develop it. If there are natural resources in the desert, God fully expects us to make use of them. I was a bit stunned by this and tried to point out that this was a theology with no ethics since it can’t make a distinction between actions that enhance and actions that degrade the health of a place. I was a little embarrassed by what felt like was turning into a Sunday School discussion with my fellow Mormon, so we let it lie at that. I wish I had at least asked him that if God gave us fossil fuels, he also gave us the sun, the wind, and the heat of the earth too. Why don’t we have an obligation to use them too?

Not long afterwards, representatives from each faith group went to the state capitol building. A few of us, including me, spoke to represent the others. This is what I said:

This remarkable interfaith effort of over 250 people from 11 different faith communities represents an exceptional undertaking for two reasons: first, it shows that a vital source of our spiritual health and renewal is access to wilderness; second, it shows that our shared love and care for wilderness unifies an extraordinary diversity of people in Utah. Our beliefs might differ, but our values harmonize on this essential point: wilderness teaches us humility, wonder, respect, and gratitude for the Creator. Wild beauty has a special quality: its joys are spiritually meaningful because they are unexpected, like grace. Wild beauty teaches us about our small but important place in a diverse, complex, and interdependent world and inspires the moral value of self-restraint. We are on a clear path to privatize, develop, and ruin every last wild and beautiful place in America. As the great LDS thinker, Hugh Nibley, once said, “the appreciation of beauty is nothing less than the key to survival.” When we get to the point where beauty is dispensable, we are in trouble. Wild beauty is a gift that requires our best stewardship.



It is human arrogance, however, to assume that stewardship gives us unbridled license to do as we please to nature or to act in short-term interest only. It is wrong to assume that nature always needs human development and improvement in order to have value. I like to remember that the Bible, for example, teaches that God used the words “good” and “very good,” to describe a world not yet inhabited by humans. I also like to remember that He commanded Adam and Eve to “dress” the garden but also to “keep” it and “take good care” of it. Of course, there is a place for gardening, extracting needed resources, and developing land. But if we assume we can use up nature without limitations, we will not only ruin its remaining wild beauty, but we will degrade ourselves. We live in an age of rapid growth and aesthetic impoverishment. To protect wilderness requires the highest principles of love, gratitude, modesty, humility, and self-sacrifice and provides more opportunities for more people to derive spiritual benefits from enjoying the wilderness responsibly.



There is a reason why deserts, mountains, and sacred groves are sought by prophets. It is because, as these people have witnessed, wilderness enhances spiritual and physical health and the bonds of family and community. We endanger our health and those bonds if we stand aside and allow continued unrestricted use of ATVs, unhampered development, fossil fuel extraction, and environmental degradation. To get serious about preserving wilderness is to get serious about living a more reverent and gentle life. We are here today to call upon our elected leaders to work with us to make meaningful progress in protecting Utah’s public and shared heritage of extraordinary wild lands.

When I was finished, state legislator Mike Noel approached me. Noel is known for his vehement anti-environmentalism. He called me “brother” and assured me that he agreed with most of what I had said. He insisted that he was a good steward of his ranch in southern Utah. I told him I had no doubt that that was true, and that I had no experience ranching. But I told him that when I had seen him recently lead a group of ATVs up the Pariah river in defiance of federal designation, I felt it was a desecration and not a good example of the “leave no trace” Boy Scout ethic, let alone the upholding of the law, which is so central to Mormon ethics. I pled with him to expend more energy articulating the importance of stewardship and less on battles with perceived enemies of his community. He asked me if I had ever seen what God does to that river in the springtime. I didn’t know what he meant. “He washes it clean every year in the spring runoff.” His theology too seemed absent of a real sense of ethics; he seemed to live in a world where choices didn’t really matter because we can’t do real harm, certainly not irreparable harm, to the earth.

A similar theology seems to be behind climate change denial. Sarah Palin once claimed it was arrogant to believe that we could warm the earth, echoing a claim that Charlton Heston had made a generation earlier about the ozone layer, suggesting that the world is perpetually able to renew itself, that we are living on some kind of ethics free planet which will perpetually absorb our wounds. Heston’s views were echoed too by novelist Michael Crichton who saw the earth’s age and complexity as reason, not for caution or conservative approaches to its uses, but for us to cease our worrying. Several years ago, when I tried to argue over email with the editor of the Provo Daily Herald, Randy Wright, about the paper’s consistently irrational attacks on climate change science, he pointed me to Heston’s recitation of Crichton’s strange world without ethics: (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozO4YB98mCY).

So when I was asked about the federal lands bill, I couldn’t take the time to recite the dangerous theologies that inform it. Despite claims that it stands little chance in court, one of its proponents, Chris Herrod, a state legislator from Provo, once said: “the rewards of going after that land are in the billions and billions. I am not a gambling man, but if someone were to say I could put a quarter in a machine and had a chance to get a billion dollars, I would put that quarter in.” Well, he is a gambling man, unless he is willing to return the millions of dollars this lawsuit is projected to cost, dollars taken from our public schools, when the lawsuit fails. I want our legislators to tell us where these anti-environmental bills are coming from and why there is an uncanny resemblance among bills proposed throughout many states. At least one explanation is ALEC: http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/04/03/457463/koch-funded-alec-behind-state-attempts-to-reclaim-your-public-lands/. So it may not be bad theology but ideology that is behind such legislation, ideology that is then dressed up as theology.

As I tried to thematize in Home Waters, land resources are such easy and frequent tools in our battle over identity. We use land, not to explore our wonderful and awesome connection to the natural world and least of all as a reminder of our need to remain humble, but as a method to shore up identity and power. Whatever the merits of increasing state rights, if it is motivated by a desire to be less answerable to the nation, to the planet, and especially to God, then I want nothing to do with it.